the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind; and, for my part, I sincerely detest it, as I detest everything that is cruel. Speaking for myself, if I had no other evidence that the Bible is fabulous than the sacrifice I must make to believe it to be true, that alone would be sufficient to determine my choice.133
The significance of the deistic movement and the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century was not in the area of historiography per se.The deists, in their discussions of the Bible and the history portrayed in the Bible, presented the issues of biblical criticism to the general public. In addition, their scathing attacks on the defences supporting a factual, literal reading of the text were devastating. It would never again be easy to present Israelite and Judean history by simply retelling and amplifying the biblical narratives.
Several developments, in addition to the deistic controversy, occurred in the eighteenth century, which should be noted since they were greatly to affect the study of Israelite and Judean history. The use of ancient literature in comparative studies of the Old Testament became more common and less apologetic. In 1685, John Spencer, of Corpus Christi College in Cambridge, published his De legibus Hebraeorum ritualibus et earum rationibus in which he compared the ritual laws of the Old Testament with relevant material from Egypt, Greece, and Rome. Comparative study, as the deists demonstrated,could cut in two directions; it could be used to support either the uniqueness or the dependency of the biblical materials. The study of Palestinian geography was advanced by Hadrian Reland’s Palaestina ex monumentis veteribus illustrata (1714) and the pioneer work in Palestinian antiquities, Compendium antiquitatum Hebraeorum, by Johann David Michaelis, appeared in 1753.
The basic elements in the documentary criticism of the Old Testament were established during this time. The German pastor Henning Bernhard Witter (1683–1715) and the French physician Jean Astruc (1684–1766) laid down some of the criteria for source criticism of the Pentateuch. The classic four-source theory of the Pentateuch was to be worked out in the nineteenth century but the five pillars of documentary criticism were established in the eighteenth. These pillars are: (1) the use of different names for the deity, (2) varieties of language and style, (3) contradictions and divergences, (4) repetitions and duplications, and (5) indications of composite structure.
A third phenomenon to be noted is the maturation of the science of Old Testament introduction. Pioneers in this area were Michaelis and Johann Salomo Semler.134 Both of these men were influenced by English deism.135 With Johann Gottfried Eichhorn’s Einleitung in das Alte Testament (1780–83), the basic problems of Old Testament introduction—growth of the canon, history of the text, and origin and nature of the individual books—were discussed in handbook form. With Eichhorn, the humanistic argument that the literature of the Old Testament should be investigated like any other literature was integrated into the mainstream of Protestant biblical study.
A fourth factor in the eighteenth century was the poetic or ‘romantic’ reaction to the classicism and rationalism of the Enlightenment. In Old Testament studies, this movement is most closely associated with the work and thought of Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) who was influenced by such figures as Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), Johann Georg Hamann (1730–88), and Robert Lowth (1710–87). The latter’s De sacra poesi Hebraeorum (1753) studied Hebrew poetry along the lines of research applied to Greek and Latin poetry, arguing that poetry represented humandkind’s earliest form of speech and was as expressive of truth as philosophy. The pietist Hamann had also expressed an emphasis on poetry as the mother-tongue of the human race and, like most pietists, stressed the reader’s immediacy to the biblical materials. Rousseau glorified primitive humandkind as a free and happy being living in accordance with nature and instinct, and for whom language was his basic expression of the natural and communal spirit.136 Herder emphasized the necessity of entering empathically into the human world out of which the Bible had come, rather than seeking understanding merely through critical and technical analysis. He was more interested in the group than the individual and in the manner in which the group gave expression to its distinctive culture, not necessarily according to any universal laws. Cultures are like plants that grow in unique ways dependent upon the situation of the place, the circumstances of the times and the generative character of the people. Whatever can take place among humankind does take place; life does not operate along rationalistic lines. Herder’s approach to the human past stressed an appreciative and imaginative relationship to the ‘spirit’ and not a rational, judgmental relationship.137
A final development in eighteenth-century Old Testament research was the introduction of mythological study. The systematic study of classical mythology originated with the German classicist Christian Gottlob Heyne (1729–1812) who argued that myth was one of primitive humandkind’s basic modes of expressing the experiences and understanding of life and nature. The first application of mythological studies to the Old Testament was made by Eichhorn, a student of Heyne at Göttingen, who published a work on Genesis 1–3 titled Die Urgeschichte (1779). Eichhorn’s work, which was greatly influenced by Lowth, was taken up by Johann Philipp Gabler (1753–1826). The concept of myth, when applied to parts of the Old Testament, greatly affected the manner in which scholars examined these materials and naturally led directly to the question of the historical factuality of their content. Later, what could be labeled as mythical was removed from the arena of the historical.138
The Nineteenth Century
Major developments in the nineteenth century that form the background for Israelite historiography may simply be noted since they have been so frequently discussed. In the first place, more liberal stances in theology came to characterize many segments of the religious communities. This liberalism was less dogmatic in its theological orientation, more progressive in its relationship to contemporary culture and thought, and more humanistic in its perspectives than previous generations. This gradual shift can be seen, for example, in the rise of the so-called Wissenschaft des Judentums movement, which sought “to see in Jewish history the gradual progression of Jewish religious or national spirit in its various vicissitudes and adjustments to the changing environments.”139 This liberal spirit, which was now located within the life of the religious communities themselves, was willing to break with traditional beliefs and approaches and to take a more critical attitude towards the biblical materials.
Secondly, major advances were made in general historiography. The nineteenth was the century of history. Of special importance was the development of what has been called a positivistic approach to history, which not only attempted but also believed it possible to reconstruct past history “as it had actually happened” (wie es eigentlich gewesen). The most prominent of these outstanding positivistic historians were Barthold Georg Niebuhr (1776–1831), Leopold Ranke (1795–1885), and Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903). Practically every aspect of human life was subjected to historical exploration in the nineteenth century.140
Thirdly, the decipherment of ancient Near Eastern languages—opened the long-closed literary remains of Israel’s neighbors to study and interpretation.141 The full impact of these new fields of learning was not to be felt fully until the last years of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth century. Nonetheless, for the first time scholars could examine the literary products of these cultures at first hand and thus were no longer dependent upon the ancient, secondary sources.
Fourthly, the exploration of the Near East and Palestine raised historical geography to a level of real competence. Explorers like the Swiss Johann Ludwig Burckhardt (1784–1817) and the American Edward Robinson (1794–1863) whose three-volume work, Biblical Researches in Palestine, Mount Sinai and Arabia Petraea (1841), based on his travels in 1838, reported on sites, place-names, and customs and used modern names to identify many places mentioned in the Bible. In 1865, the Palestine Exploration Fund was established and, in 1872–78, it sponsored a geographical survey of western Palestine (the Conder–Kitchener expedition). Other national societies were begun to encourage and finance exploration. Archaeological excavations at several sites in Palestine were undertaken.142
Fifthly,
